Cementing the city's future

When a line of 90 concrete trucks began pulling up to the Trustpower building site Durham Street early one November morning, they contributed to a 550 m3 sea of concrete. That’s the largest single concrete pour on a building site in the history of CBC.

The trucks began rolling onto the site at 2.30am, to help form the northern end of the basement. By the time the building is completed – it’s scheduled for February 2016 – the building site will have swallowed 2500 m3 of cement.

“That’s 420 trucks in total,” says CBC director Drew Beekie.

Drew says Trustpower’s new head office building is the second-largest in Tauranga and will eventually house 400 staff. “This is a pretty complex structure but the project is rolling along nicely.”

Trustpower community relations manager Graeme Purches, says CBC and the team have been a pleasure to deal with and it is exciting that things are on track.

“I went down to the site at 5am one morning, in the dark, when the team were working away under floodlights doing the first big concrete pour. It was fantastic to see people and machines all working away to get the pour got done before sunrise, to ensure the concrete could set properly. There’s a lot of steel and concrete involved. It makes you realise just how complicated big building projects like this are,” says Graeme.